Which place, what story?: Cultural discourses at the border of the Blackfeet Reservation and Glacier National Park

Great Plains Quarterly

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 167-184

  Carbaugh, Donal ^a   Rudnick, Lisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

Author keywords

Blackfeet; Ethnography of communication; Intercultural communication; Narrative; Placenames

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL LANDSCAPE; ETHNICITY; NATIONAL PARK; PLACE NAME;

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK [MONTANA]; MONTANA; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33748960303     PISSN: 02757664     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
2. David Samuels, "Indeterminacy and History in Britton Goode's Western Apache Place-names: Ambiguous Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation," American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (2001): 277-302.
3. Also see Charles Braithwaite, "Sa'ah naaghai bik'eh hozhoon [Navajo Philosophy for Living]: An Ethnography of Navajo Educational Communication Practices," Communication Education 46 (1997): 219-33;
4. Donal Carbaugh, Situating Selves: The Communication of Social Identities in American Scenes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 157-90.
5. See, for examples, Stephen Feld and Keith Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996);
6. Tamar Katriel, Performing the Past (Manwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996);
7. Gerry Philipsen, Speaking Culturally (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 21-42;
8. and Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
9. For recent examples, see Donal Carbaugh, Cultures in Conversation (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995);
10. Gerry Philipsen, "The Prospect for Cultural Communication," in Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. L. Kincaid, 245-54 (New York: Academic Press, 1987);
11. Gerry Philipsen, "Cultural Communication," in Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, ed. W. Gudykunst and B. Mody, 51-67 (New York: Sage, 2002).
12. For seminal statements of the approach, see Dell Hymes "Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life," in Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, 35-71 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston), 1972;
13. and Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996).
14. See Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
15. For a related work on Blackfeet communication and culture, see Donal Carbaugh, "The People Will Come to You": Blackfeet Narrative as a Resource for Contemporary Living," in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self, and Culture, ed. J. Brockmeier and D. Carbaugh, 103-27 (Amsterdam: J. J. Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001).
16. A Blackfeet reader of this essay said about this particular "introduction to the place": "This transcript of the Blackfeet Guide... is distinctly familiar with the '... out here on this flat,' and '... we had what was called the starvation winter,' as well as the entire narrative ringing of the colloquial style of English-speaking Blackfeet. It is good to hear there are individuals speaking from this perspective today." He made a similar statement about the Blackfeet guide's comments concerning the sacredness of Chief Mountain.
17. The phrase "unoccupied territory" is used with great irony, for the discourse explicitly focuses on a wilderness without people, while masking the historical government process of dispossessing the place (of its Native people) that was and is necessary for this portrayal. See Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 86-89.
18. Various detailed accounts are written about Running Eagle. For examples, see James Willard Schultz, Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park (1916; reprint, Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press and Riverbend Publishing, 2002), 11-21;
19. and James Willard Schultz, Signposts of Adventure: Glacier National Park as the Indians Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), 20-21.
20. A superb DVD has been made about the encounter between Meriwether Lewis and the Blackfeet. Titled Two-Worlds at Two Medicine, directed by Curly Bear Wagner and Dennis Neary, the story is told through the voices of Native American spokespersons and elders (Browning, MT: Going-to-the-Sun Institute and Native View Pictures, 2004).
21. See Schultz, Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park, 141-43;
22. Schultz, Signposts of Adventure, 102-25.
23. See especially Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places;
24. and David Samuels, "Indeterminacy and History in Britton Goode's Western Apache Placenames," 157-90.